Bush Wants To Stall Stealth, Cut Sdi Funds

April 24, 1989|By STANLEY MEISLER Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON — Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, acknowledging that he had been overruled on one of his first proposals as a member of the Cabinet, Sunday confirmed reports that President Bush has decided to fund both the MX and Midgetman missiles in the 1990 defense budget.

Cheney further disclosed decisions to delay production of the Stealth bomber for a year and to scaledown former President Reagan's coveted Star Wars program.

Cheney's remarks amounted to a preview of the $298.2 billion revised defense budget - trimmed $10 billion from what was originally requested by Reagan - that Bush will present to Congress Tuesday. A former House Republican whip who always voted for spiraling defense budgets, Cheney insisted that his cuts came from necessity, not from philosophy.

"If it were my decision to make today, I'd spend more on defense and have real growth in defense on a steady, stable basis over time," Cheney told interviewers on NBC's televised "Meet the Press".

"That's not an option," he said. "The president and the Congress have made a decision that the budget will be cut."

The president's rebuff of Cheney's views came on the Midgetman decision. In line with the prevailing view of the Pentagon, the secretary had recommended that Bush kill the $24 billion Midgetman program, which would place single warhead Midgetman missiles on trucks, and rely solely on the $5.4 billion program that would take 50 MX missiles, each with 10-warheads, from their existing silos and place them on flat railroad cars.

But Bush listened instead to pleas from congressional leaders and from Brent Scowcroft, his national security adviser, that he salvage the Midgetman even while going ahead with the MX program. They believe that the truck-based, smaller Midgetmen would be much harder for an enemy to attack than the larger MX missiles.

The secretary's decision to delay production of the B2 Stealth bomber did not appear to augur well for the future of these planes that, at the enormous cost of $517 million each, would be designed to evade an enemy's radar screens. The plane is produced at the Northrop Corp.'s Palmdale, Calif., plant.

Asked if he would consider killing the program, Cheney said, "The Stealth bomber, in this current go around, will be delayed a year. We're going to postpone actually going into full procurement because I'm not comfortable with the program yet."

On the Star Wars defense system, or, as the Pentagon and White House prefer to call it, the Strategic Defense Initiative, Cheney said that spending would be cut by $7 billion over the next five years.

Cheney said that the Star Wars emphasis in the next two years would be testing "The new Brilliant Pebbles concept ... to see if we can in fact go that route."

The designers of that weapon envision myriad small interceptors in space - the brilliant pebbles - capable of demolishing ballistic missiles heading toward the United States.

In additional budget cutting, the secretary of defense announced reductions in personnel that had been resisted tenaciously by both the Army and the Navy. Cheney said that the Army would lose 8,000 personnel and the Navy would lose a carrier group.

The loss of a carrier group - an aircraft carrier and its air wing - would amount to a reduction of 4,000 personnel. This cut would mean the early retirement of one of the two oldest aircraft carriers now in the the Navy - the Coral Sea or the Midway.